


Saviour

by Crux01



Category: Homeland
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 04:17:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4045612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crux01/pseuds/Crux01
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two and a half years later: After a prolonged stay in Aleppo, Quinn's self-extraction as seen from an unfamiliar perspective.......</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saviour

**Author's Note:**

> For our Syrian sisters who suffer still.......

Sabriya was not about to let go of him.

He was her saviour, her Fadi, and no one would take him from her. She was convinced they would cross into paradise together. In her head she had made the decision, accepted their fate, was resolved to simply wait until the lethally poisonous infection spreading through his body and the terrific hunger that threatened hers, claimed them both. 

Together they would be saved.....

And yet here was this beautiful American woman, the opposite of everything Sabriya had become. Her smooth, pale skin, her hair glowing like spun gold in the sunshine spearing through the thin canvas of the tent, her fashionably cut stylish clothes and perfect makeup, even her smell so clean and fresh; the embodiment of cultured confidence, the epitome of life. And she seemed intent on taking even that last hope away from the dirty, hungry, lost, little Syrian refugee.

Sabriya cried, using as much of her waning strength as she could, trying to lay across his limp body, trying to stop this woman with her urgent voice and authoritative commands but realisation came quickly that she would lose this fight, as she had lost every other one in her short pitiful life. 

"My Fadi," she thought, slipping from his body, instantly missing his touch, she tried to implore the woman with her wide eyes, trying to explain but the words wouldn't come. Why would they? She had not uttered a word for over six months, had lost the ability in the battered hellhole of Aleppo. And, without words, how could she tell this woman what they had suffered, how they had come to be in this refugee camp on the Syrian-Turkish border. How he had saved her? How they should be together; that it was right and proper that they should die here, together?

Her father would have found the words as would her elder sister, Sabeen, but both had been lost, her father arrested before the war even started and her sister, so brave and proud had left, determined that she would go to a women’s conference in Egypt no matter what the risk; neither had ever come home.

Sabeen had been the intelligent one, quick witted, energised by the very thrill of living and convinced that she would do good, that she could change the world whereas Sabriya's only dream had been to live a more traditional life, find a satisfactory boy and simply marry him. Their father said that Sabeen watched too many American TV programmes, that they filled her head with expectations and ideas that could never be but as he said it there was a proud glint in his eyes that Sabriya never saw when he spoke of her. He had always been closer to his eldest daughter, they shared a link that Sabriya could never touch but it did not interfere with her relationship with Sabeen. Sabriya positively worshipped her older sister and her loss had been harder than that of her distant, stern father.

After Sabeen's disappearance they had struggled on but misery held them in its tight, unyielding grip. Sabriya watched powerless as her mother gradually fell away like the petals of a delicate flower when the winter frosts come, fading before her eyes. The once beautiful and caring woman had given up, the life leaving her with no fight. She had simply sat in the kitchen and stared at the bare walls, aware of nothing, her eyes already dead, broken by a world that refused to care.

Courageously Sabriya had determined to look after both her mother and her little brother, Afif, but by then Aleppo was an apocalyptic place; a city in its death throes, bleeding from a thousand vicious wounds as the war dragged on. Stinking piles of trash rotting in the wan sunlight, with children, fewer as the years past, their empty eyes haunted by the horror and their hands reaching out forlornly for food like starving chicks in an overcrowded nest and the corpses, of course the corpses, twisted and untouched, too many to count but all had once been someone's daughters and sons, left now to decay where they fell in the hot Syrian summers, unmarked and unmourned. The sound of bombs detonating was constant; people no longer cowered with fear but scrabbled desperately amongst the rubble searching for meagre scraps. There were no cats or dogs and precious few rats left in the city. 

Sabriya didn't know what a barrel bomb was, but she knew what it could do; she had seen what the explosion did to her mother and Afif's fragile bodies, crushed and broken beyond repair under piles of rubble on a day when she had been so excited to return home with a crust of mouldy bread that she had bartered away her mother's last golden ring for, clutched possessively in her hungry hands.

In Sabriya's recent experience tragedy was always victorious over hope and dark death ruled life in a pitiless and pointless reign.

It was then that her words left her.

Feeling utterly alone, she joined the constant flood of refugees who finally had lost hope and deserted Aleppo after enduring the long years of war, on the road north to Turkey. She didn't know where they were going or why but anywhere seemed better than the wretched, emptying ruins of her city. She walked with her head down, dreaming of the feasts she had so carelessly eaten in her childhood, when all was right with the world and horror, though close, had still to claim her and her family. Her swollen, empty stomach cried out like a newborn babe for sustenance.

As she walked, she sensed the sympathetic glances tossed her way by the older women She heard one girl, little older than her with dark stains on the front of her skirts and dead eyes, whisper hoarsely. “I think I was supposed to be a message to other women. You protest; we take your virginity, your honour." The older women, when they noticed Sabriya listening had shushed her, but not before the girl had finished mournfully, “I think that’s why they raped me.” As she spoke, Sabriya noted the young girl's whole demeanour seemed to lose the vitality of youth shifting to that an old, debilitated woman with death perched at her shoulder.

Sabriya thought she vaguely knew what the word 'rape' meant but she wasn't sure about what it actually entailed. She knew, however, that it was bad, very bad, and something that she needed to avoid at all costs. But on the road from the destroyed and ravaged Aleppo, the stories were always the same: the Shabiha came after the heavy fighting ended, cleared out the houses, stole what was left, beat the men and raped the women.

That night, chewing on the hard crust, the cost of which had been so high, Sabriya had listened unnoticed in the shadows as three sisters in hushed, pain-filled voices described how a group of Syrian army soldiers had come to their house, tied up their father and brother, and made them watch as they raped each of the sisters. One of the women cried as she went on to describe how after the rape the soldiers opened their legs and burned them in their most sensitive places with cigarettes. She said the soldiers had said, "You want freedom? This is your freedom."

Sabriya had shivered and pulled her faded, lavender hijab tightly around her head. She was thirteen years old, her shoulders had only the strength of the child she still was and her waist was minuscule. She wore the last clothes she had left; a thick dirty sweater over her tight holed jeans, too hot in the day and too cold at night, they accentuated the thin outline of her adolescent body. She began to realise with an icy, terrifying certainty that the soldiers would come and when they did they would rape her, she would have no defence. She was not strong enough to fight them herself and she had no one else to rely on, no one who would defend her. She did not sleep that night, huddled beside the road, lurching at every noise, fearing that her time had come.

Her time came eventually at dusk the following day and it was not soldiers but a group of men coming south along the road looking specifically for young girls. Sabriya thought they were Turks but she wasn't sure and she dare not look more closely as she tried hopelessly to hide within a poor family who had been shambling along the road in front of her. The family shrank away from the stark aggression of the newcomers, the father easily giving up Sabriya to save his own daughters, then hustling his small family away without a backward glance but his shoulders drooping even lower by his guilt. Sabriya soon found herself staring up into cruel eyes, misshapen teeth and vile breath and knew that this was the moment that her dread doom would occur.

Fear paralysed her completely as her heart hammered a terrified tattoo, her legs lost all strength; it was only the man's rough hands that held her upright. She closed her eyes and preyed to her God, clinging desperately to the last remnants of her faith.

Her rescue occurred then, so quickly, that Sabriya, in her stupefied state, wasn't sure of what was taking place until it was over. There was the rustling of movement, and the sound of flesh hitting flesh, men screaming and the thud of lifeless bodies falling to the ground. When Sabriya's senses began to function normally once more there was only one man left standing, the bloody bodies of the Turks were in various untidy piles around her, none of them moved at all. 

The standing man knelt and wiped his blade clean on the shirt of the Turk who had held her. He staggered slightly, groaning, as he stood back up and Sabriya saw the slit in the trouser leg of his left thigh revealing the long jagged cut from which crimson blood was dripping to make a dark puddle on the dusty road.

She regarded him minutely, looking for any clues as to whether he was friend or foe. He was straight and tall like a soldier, dressed in black and somehow, not like the other men on the road, his clothes though covered with as much dust as anyone else's were of western cut and made of a different shiny material, light and yet strong, that was not familiar to her. He fumbled now to replace the knife in the belt at his waist, at his other side was an empty gun holster. His face was covered by a black desert scarf and as he lifted his head, only his eyes were revealed. Sabriya drew in a long breath because they were a brilliant exotic blue, as deep as the ocean.

He silently regarded her for a long time as if trying to decide his next move, this foreigner she believed was an American but she could not be sure. Every lesson she had ever been taught, every fibre of her being, told her to look away demurely but she naively thought she knew enough about American culture from her childhood and Sabeen's whispered descriptions at night after the lights had been turned off in the bedroom they had shared, to risk all. She remembered Sabeen had read a magazine article once that had said that the greatest weapon a woman had was confidence. So ignoring all her clamouring instincts, she stared back at him, holding his stare as bravely as she dare.

Finally he shook his head and made to move off to join the tide of humanity that had hesitated for only the time it took him to dispatch the Turks and was now flowing onward once more. Sabriya was gripped by a desperate fear that he was leaving her and she would be terrifyingly alone once more. In a move that ordinarily would have horrified her with its forthrightness she removed her hijab, ran to him, bent and started to dab hesitantly at his leg wound. The man stopped, cocked his head at her, but allowed her to continue. As her confidence grew Sabriya fashioned a bandage around the wound and when she had finished, he looked down at her, squeezing her arm in a gesture of thanks. For the first time since she had lost her mother and Afif, she smiled.

They had walked together after that. When her blisters popped and hurt too much or her feeble legs refused to go further, he gently lifted her in his strong arms and, carrying her, continued the trek northwards. She had never been so close to a man, even her father, before. He smelt of sweat and blood but something else too; something that reminded her of her early childhood, of home before the war had come. She dozed in his arms wandering if safe could have a smell at all. 

He didn't seem to mind that she didn't talk because he didn't either. She wondered what horror had brought him to this place, why was he on this road alone in the pitiful crowd of her desperate countrymen? What had he endured that had stolen his words; she could tell from the shadows that haunted his ice blue eyes that it had been at least as bad as her own suffering.

When he removed his scarf and she saw his face she wasn't in the least bit frightened to see that beneath his spiky, unkempt black hair, razor sharp cheekbones and whispery dark beard, his skin was whiter than any man she had ever seen before. Again, it was obvious to her that this man was different from any other on the road. He was so handsome, braver and stronger evidenced by the fact that he had dispatched those Turks with such courageous ease but he was gentle and caring too. Sabriya, her teenage heart longing so viciously to connect with someone falling irrevocably in love with him, really came to believe that he was her saviour and so, in her head, she called him by the Arabic name; Fadi.

He shared the last of his dry rations with her and his water. Water was the only commodity of value on the road and a little drop went a long way because it was so hot during the day. There were scuffles and fights over meagre amounts, desperate men killing each other but more likely women and children who could not fight back. Sabriya saw that when forced to chose, some men would always chose to fight those weaker than themselves. To her relief no one dared come near her, not with her beautiful Fadi by her side.

The dusty road seemed as endless as the line of refugees who stumbled along it, heads down to the ground blindly trudging towards their hoped for salvation. Gunfire could be heard sporadically mainly in the towns that they passed and fighter jets could be seen high in the azure sky. Trucks and tanks rolled down the road towards Aleppo, swirling up clouds of dust that choked the back of the throat making it hard to breathe, pushing them all from the shell-dented Tarmac, on to the wild, abandoned fields at the roadside. But Sabriya felt lighter and safer as she walked beside her protector all day and slept beside him when they stopped, tucked up beneath his jacket as the warmth of the early autumn days chilled into the velvet black, star-studded night. She marvelled that in only a few short days she had become so comfortable with a complete stranger, an unrelated male at that. For his part he never seemed to sleep, never relaxed, his hand always close to the hilt of his knife, his eyes narrow, scanning the scene around them, ready to face any danger.

As they neared the border and the crowds swarmed like termites on a hill, it became apparent that his injury was worse than either had realised. He could not carry her further, in fact he had begun to struggle to walk on his own, and rested his hand on her shoulder as if she was some kind of crutch. Through the thickness of the jumper she wore she could feel his shivers begin and strengthen as the heat of fever roared through him. At one point he had to stop at the roadside as he retched the meagre contents of his stomach into the dust, before swilling the bitter taste from his mouth and beginning to limp northwards once more.

Through sheer strength of will he made it to the refugee camp at the border but as she helped him wearily climb on to the cot under the starched white canvas of the hastily erected tent, standing like a soldier on parade in a row of identical tents, she knew that the life was leaving him. She removed her makeshift bandage and smelt the stomach churning stench of his rotting flesh before she saw the wound blazing with throbbing infection in his leg. There must be doctors just like there must be food in the camp but a wave of numbing hopelessness washed through her as she realised she dare not leave him for either.

She was suddenly exhausted and overcome, the fight left her weakened body as it had her mother before her. If this was God's will so be it. She would die here in this place with him and they would enter paradise together. As she thought it, she accepted it. That would be enough since there was nothing left for her on this earth, nothing to live for. So she kept him as comfortable as she could, dabbing his fevered brow with the last drops of their water, as he mumbled in his delirium and died slowly before her.

She had been sleeping, her head on his chest as the breaths rattled painfully in and out of his lungs when their peaceful descent to the release that death would bring had suddenly been shattered forever. The unknown American woman, full of the lust for life and burning with a fiery passion, stormed into the tent bringing the incongruous scent of roses and the more familiar stench of desperation with her. With barely a glance at Sabriya, she had dropped to her knees beside him.

"Quinn? Quinn!" She had hissed her concern into his pale, sweaty face. And then she turned and ordered something to the men who were loitering at the entrance of the tent. Sabriya had never heard a woman use such a commanding tone with men, even her sister Sabeen had not dared to talk with such authority, but the men rushed to do as they were bid.

It was then with heart wrenching clarity that Sabriya realised that this woman meant to take her Fadi away. Tears of hopelessness began to pour down her dirty cheeks as her watery vision smudged and the world became indistinct. The men were only blurry figures to her as they brought in a stretcher and as gently as they could loaded her Fadi on to it.

The American woman squeezed his hand, talking to him in soothing sounds like those Sabriya imagined lovers would use. It was as if the blonde American was speaking life back into the fading body on the bed and sure enough he did appear to rally, even opened his eyes and nodded in recognition as his hand tightened on the woman's.

Sabriya's gut twisted as she realised that these two people shared a connection the like of which she would never have. It was like her father and sister all over again. He had saved her from the Turks and from the other dangers on the road, seen her here to relative safety that was true but he had never been hers, not ever, not really, however much she wanted it to be so, his heart must belong to this vivacious, American beauty. And now his lover was here to claim him, to take him away. 

Sabriya fell to her knees as they took the stretcher out and him with it, the shaft of sunlight that pierced through the tent was dulled by the closure of the flap and all went dark. Desolate, noiseless sobs wracked through her weak body, as she stretched her hands out impotently to him and she felt her heart break agonisingly in her chest.

All was lost. She would die alone and unloved. The very last person she cared about was gone. He was lost to her.

And then the tent flap was pulled back again. The American woman stood silhouetted by the light, mouth curved into an anxious but sincere smile as she stepped forwards. "I'm sorry," she began, surprising Sabriya with the high standard of her Arabic. "I was worried about Quinn." She let out a snort. "I've come half way around the world, left my little girl, to find him. Haven't seen him for years, I thought he was dead." She shook her head sympathetically. "But enough of me, you look like you're not in much better shape than he is." She stretched out her arms in the universal gesture of friendship, her golden smile wide and warm. "Come on, you poor thing, let's get you to a doctor too!"

Sabriya hesitated, sniffing back her tears and then, hope rekindled and beginning to mend her battered heart, she took a step towards a new better life........


End file.
